It is almost no surprise that you can listen to music with Emacs! You can listen to Pandora and

  • change the station
  • love/ban the playing song
  • skip the current song

without leaving the comfort of your favorite editor.

It is awesome and very convenient to use Emacs for many things (e.g. Dired as file browser, shell to run commands interactively, magit as git interface). Although I don’t think that listening to music with Emacs will make me more effective, I started using it, because it is fun!

Setting it up

The Emacs package that provides interface to Pandora is called Pianobar mode which actually uses the command-line Pandora client pianobar.

First you need to install pianobar. It can be available to install via your package manager. Otherwise, download pianobar here. If you use Ubuntu, you can install it using apt-get.

$ sudo apt-get install pianobar

The next step is to install pianobar-mode. The easiest way is to install using the package manager.

M-x package-install <RET> pianobar-mode <RET>

If your Emacs is older than version 24, download pianobar.el here.

Finally, autoload the package by adding the following to your init file.

(autoload 'pianobar "pianobar" nil t)

And you are ready to listen to some music!

M-x pianobar

Some optional configuration

You can set your username/password and define key bindings for some pianobar functions.